STREET NAMING, STREET SHAMING by Perkin Warbeck

There is a motion before Dublin City Council to name a street in memory of Savita Halappanava.

There is little doubt but that they will cave in to this motion, just as their fellow big wigs and other apologetic speleologists (not a darling word to spell, Joxer) on the Board of the Abbey Theatre meekly caved in.

To a motion by apoplectic Female Thespian Prompters who stormed the stage of, erm, Amharclann Náisiúnta na hEireann to deliver their historic epigram by the collective kilogram.

-Be seen to get your act together when it comes to drama queens !

Otherwise:

-Pass our motion or else, face a commotion !!

Savita Halappanava was the unfortunate lady who died in 2012 at Galway University Hospital due to complications of a septic miscarriage.

But, why Dublin rather than Galway as the city of pro-choice ? One would have thought the Pro-choice Motion Passers (for it is they !) would have been pro-Galway, the City of Joyce Country rather than pro-Dublin, the Joyce City, when it came to a pro-choice of city.

So, why the anomaly?

Publicity, dear girl. The bigger the cachet city, the BIGGER the splashet ditto.

The only item on this gender agenda is the street: already the poodles on the street of Fair City are sharply barking:

-Merrion Street, Upper.

Which will raise all sorts of hares, hairs and even heirs to the Throne of Ochone. (see below)

But first, a pause, to ponder the cause of this anomalous pro-choice of a city.

One does not have to look too far, much less to run nearly as far as Mo Farah. For Dublin (Ireland, not Texas) now is Femagogue Central whose stock in trade is Misandry.

The Toxicford English Dictionary defines Misandry as either Misogyny in a Pant Suit or Misogyny in Designer Dungarees, depending on the class of the Femagogue.

The coven of Femagoguery to which the ‘ruling’ classes feel most obliged to be cavin’ into, is located on the premises of (gulp) The Unionist Times. This is the coven which is not at all best pleased that the dowdy Melania will now be the First Lady rather than the glamour-puss Chelsea.

Now that the Comey Maiden is crying a river there is dancing go leor at the very crossroads of the media that the Chosen One did not crack the Glass Ceiling. Blithely ignoring the fact that the female mother of the newly elected and not at all rejected President was a crofter’s wee daughter from the village of Tunga/ Tong on the Isle of Lewis/ Eilean Leodhais in the Outer Heprides.

For her Orange-tinted son to make it to the White House Wee Mary Anne McLeod (for it was she !) in her time had to break through the, erm, Grass Sheiling. Somehow, one does not see the Dungareed Daughters of the Dworkin Class put that indubitable factoid into their dudeens and puffing it in the Huffington Post in the near future, oops, anytime soon.

At one stage during the Three De-Bouts of the race to become the Residential President of the Choc Bán /White House one was and still is bigly flummoxed that Lady Pant Suit hadn’t the stomach to fix that beady eye of hers in that haughty haute-en-bas way of hers down upon her mere male opponent:

-Gee , Donald, where’s your kilt ?

Whatever about the remarkable dogs in the street and how they might embark upon a bout of barking at you, the alley cats are hissing their Misandry like good-oh, for.

For It is a truthiness universally acknowledged that just as too far West is East (see Galway and Dublin above) ; by the same token male, a Misogynist too far is a (gasp) Misandrist.

This is what Una Mullally, Bachelor of Arts, had to categorially tut tut in TUT, that lofty loft of leftoverness (soi-disant as in SDLP)  even as she stirred her troubled cauldron so that it bubbled to the boil.

-Trump’s rise to power, with his ugly form of fascism, is not the fault of liberal, progressive America. It is the fault of racist, bigoted America.

Whoaaaaa, there, Una ! Hold yo’ hosses !

Alas, Missy Prissy of Tara House does not seem to realise that even cowgirls get the blues, even red-necked cowgirls. As even a curse-of-goddess cursory glance at the electoral map of the Land of Aunt Samantha, not will tell.

For there, from the necks of the woods in Texas to Florida, via Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama are all coloured red. This is unsurprising for this is the homeland of the very gals whom the tut tuters of TUT would deny a voice, much less a vote:

-Some people look down on me

But I don’t give a rip

I stand barefoot in my front yard

With a baby of my hip.

Why? Pray, tell.

-Coz I’m a redneck woman

I ain’t no high class broad

I’m just a product of my raisin’

And I say ‘Hey, y’all’ and ‘Hee Haw !’.

So, is Missy Una Mullally, Bachelor of Arts, really and truly opining that only bluestockings rather than rednecks should be franchised, that the latter deplorable basket heads are too insufferable to be given the suffrage?

Surely not, Shirley.

-And I keep my Christmas lights on my front porch all year long

And I know the words of every Charlie Daniels song

And here’s to all my sisters out there keeping it country

Let me give a big ‘Hell, yeah!’ from the redneck girls like me

Hell, yeah !

Ah, the memories which these lyrics evoke in the Perkin’s inner Mammary Lane. And the nights he passed (but not out) in ole Charlie Daniels’ Bar on Second Avenue in Downtown Nashviille ( a tavern not noted for the oratorios of John Tavener) when, after every third song in a set, the fiddle-infiltrated music would stop.

So as to allow the resident redneck cowgirl in her Wrangler denim diva dress and high-kicking boots with spurs on, to take on the audience and to take up a collection with, as basket qua basket, the biggest goddarn Stetson as ever a cotton-pickin eye did see.

-Would y’all kindly like to make a dough-nation, suh ?

Remarkably, said redneck cowgirl bore a not unremarkable resemblance to Missy Melania T. (Be still, one’s beating heart !). As indeed, if it comes to that, so too did her buckskin coworkers. Equally remarkably. instead of proposing a motion to twin Dublin with lovely Ljubljana the pro-choice passers of motions are proposing that Hell, yeah, in the shape of Connaught be brought to Dublin.

And if, as the dogs bark and the alley cats hiss, the street of pro-choice to be rebaptised in the Femagogue faith is to be Merrion Street, Upper, Dublin 2, home to Govenment Building itself, then be scared, sisters, be very scared.

Constantina Fucius say: beware, Femagogue, what you wish for.

For, verily, will it open a can of ear-worms. The Perkin’s inner re-arranger of street furniture, is not totally unfamiliar with this particular street, which, amongst other things, boasts the birthhouse of the Victor of Waterloo who gave the unlucky generals of Napoleon some welly.

But it was a statue which most exercised his wonderings as he wandered down this street of Statutes. A statue to a Leitrim man, naturally, who became a doctor, an explorer, a British Army Officer and a naturalist.

-Thomas Heazle Parkes.

Whether it was the similarity of names that caused The Perkin to park himself outside the railings of the Dead Zoo of Dublin aka The Natural History Museum and gawk up at Parkey is open to conjecture. But further research managed to suss out the following, erm, weasel words about old Heazle. A peculiar bird, if ever there was one.

In 1890 he campaigned with Henry Morton Stanley on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Not only did he become known as ‘the man who saved Morton’ but in the process became the first Irishman to traverse the continent of Africa.

During this trip into the white unknown he (gasp) bought a pigmy for, among other reasons, to assist him in making his way through the darkest part of the Dark Continent, the dense jungles of Central Africa.

And, sisters, this is the kicker.

Not only was it a female pigmy but on emerging from the darkness of the jungle he promptly ditched his recently purchased item of personal baggage.

-Sigh no more, ladies, man was ever a deceiver.

In 1893, Thomas Heazle Parkes departed on his last expedition to an even Darker Continent of the Great Out Yonder. This journey into the unknown started in Scotland; on arrival at the Dublin Docks his body was transported in a gun carriage by road to Drumsna, County Leitrim for burial.

This metropolitan village of 173 souls is associated with two novelists, Anthony Trollope and Flann O Brien. The former wrote ‘The McDermotts of Ballycloran’ when resident there in the 19^th C while the latter novelist was prompted by the actual name of the vast village ‘Droim ar Snámh’ (‘Afloat on its Back’) to call his own máistirshaothar ‘At-Swim-Two-Birds’.

Perkie’s inner Femagogue says:

-Down with the stautue of Parkey !

(Just to be on the safe side of the Sisterhood, like).

Unless this measured advice is acted upon, it is unlikely that the Sisterhood of the Femagogue will choose Merrion Street Upper as its first pro-choice.

In the interests of p. and reconciliation, however, the Perkin’s inner Reformed Donald would like to suggest the following compromise, one which would require but the merest tinkering with the spelling. Not unlike say:

-Make Ireland Grate Again !

By way of compensation to Dame Dosh Finucane of RTE for doing a job which is half as important as that of the Prime Minister of the FSS but for which she only draws upon double the salary from the curse-of-god public purse: and especially considering that Shrewsbury Road is already spoken for:

-Marian Street Upper.